Burnt Orange Report

TSP Report

By Karl-Thomas Musselman

For those of you here that care about the Daily Texan and whether it's editor remains elected or gets moved to an appointed process, here is a report from the last meeting (even though I don't understand it all, a lot of you Exes and Alumni will). I tend to favor elections personally, but don't really have much of a dog in this fight as of yet. But for now it looks like the decision to move to an appointed editor or not will go up for a student referendum.

What follows is a brief summary of the Board's action at our most recent meeting:

1) The Board voted to ask the UT System to hold off on implementation of the revised Operating Agreement, which was initially intended to be a replacement for the Declaration of Trust. Legal questions regarding the nature of the current document should be resolved over the summer. At that point, we will move forward with either a revised trust instrument or a version of the Operating Agreement.

2) The Board voted to formally ask the UT System Office of General Counsel for an opinion regarding the viability of the Declaration of Trust. In the case that the document is considered to constitute a trust, we would want to know if certain provisions (including prior review and the elected editor) are conditions of the trust or merely amendable provisions of the document. We would also ask who the beneficiaries of the trust are: students or TSP entities?

3) The Board voted to ask for UT's approval to hire outside counsel to consider these issues as well.

4) Per my recommendation last month, the Board voted to rescind its March 4 vote regarding the elected editor. Though the Texas Open Meetings Act does not adhere to most actions of TSP, we want to be as open as possible in conducting our business. We rescinded this vote because some people believed that the March 4 agenda was not sufficiently clear to indicate that the editor selection process was under consideration.

5) The Board voted to continue to study the editor selection issue and to pursue a student referendum to determine how students at large feel about appointing the Texan editor. We are currently discussing the implementation of this process. The Board itself took no position regarding whether the editor should be elected or appointed. The issue will, however, be picked up again in the Fall.

6) The Board voted to ask the University to cease its practice of prior review.